A sad situation for which I can see no solution

I probably shouldn't blog about such depressing topics, but occasionally I must. Here's the story. To summarize: 24-year-old Eboni Perri was arrested a few weeks ago and charged with starving her 2-year-old daughter to death. Read that again and ponder the depths of depravity to which people will sink. Done pondering? She did it to collect on a $14,000 insurance policy she took out on the kid, Nakeisha Walker, last year. According to police, she was the second of Eboni's kids to be born a cocaine and marijuana addict. The story gets worse, if you can believe it. Child Protective Services (to paraphrase Nelson Muntz, I think, there's at least two things wrong with that phrase) was called - wait for it - FIVE times to investigate complaints that Nakeisha and her two siblings - an 8-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy - were being neglected. In 2003, services were offered twice. In 2004, CPS could find no problem. In March 2005, according to the CPS spokeswoman, "allegations of neglect by the mother were substantiated." You think? That was the day they found Nakeisha, aged 2 and weighing 14 pounds, dead. It took over a year, but Eboni was indicted on 23 June. The story, of course, gets worse.

Eboni was bailed out (how on earth did that happen?) and a week ago called CPS and asked to pick up her two other children. CPS obliged, handing them over for the weekend. In February, before the indictment, a judge ruled she should be allowed unsupervised visits with her children. Nobody is quite sure if it should still be allowed now that she has been indicted.

Of course, nobody is talking. Everyone says that because the case is still pending, they can't go on record. That makes sense. Something else that makes sense is never allowing this woman near her children ever again.

This is disgusting. Laurie Roberts has a long tradition of exposing the awfulness of CPS. This is just the latest episode. A lot of people don't want government sticking their noses into Americans' personal business, but if this isn't something that government should be involved in, I don't know what is. Of course, I don't really have a good answer for this. There are so many shitty parents out there who keep pumping out kids, and these kids are almost guaranteed to be doomed to failure. Sure, there will be a few who get out, but almost all won't. So what do we do with them? First, CPS is absolutely horrible about following up with these things. But if they take the kids away, they become wards of the state. People looking to adopt are few and far between. There are far too many of these children who are being neglected, abused, and even killed by idiotic people, either the mothers or the fathers or the mothers' boyfriends. These kinds of stories make me despair for the future of civilization. I'm totally serious. What should we do? Enforced sterilization? Why on earth would this woman have children? Is she that stupid that she doesn't know how not to? In my old school, we had a girl who was, quite literally, as dumb as a post, and she was 17 with two kids already. Was she just that stupid?

I'm sick over stuff like this. I don't even know where to start solving this problem. I'm not even sure if it can be.